Ripple remittance apps launch in Korea, Kuwait

Coinone Transfer, a subsidiary of major Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinone, has joined RippleNet and is using Ripple’s cross-border payment solution xCurrent. It is the first digital asset exchange in Korea to partner with RippleNet. Separately Kuwait’s biggest bank, the National Bank of Kuwait has also launched a remittance app using RippleNet.

Korea

A new remittance service, titled “Cross,” offered to Coinone Transfer’s retail customers aims to meet growing demand in Korea for faster and cheaper payments and cross-border transfers. The Cross service is live and so far enables transfers to Thailand (via Siam Commercial Bank) and the Philippines (via Cebuana Lhuillier). Going forward the plan is to allow Cross customers to transfer money to family and friends across Southeast Asia.

Ripple confirms: “xCurrent allows for payments of any size to move quickly, transparently and at low cost across borders making it ideal for the volume and smaller size of remittance payments.”

Ripple has two major products xCurrent and xRapid. xCurrent uses the RippleNet instead of the correspondent banking system. Whereas xRapid additionally uses the XRP cryptocurrency as the medium of exchange.

Wonhee Shin, CEO of Coinone Transfer, believes xCurrent will “revolutionize” the lives of their customers through real-time global payments.

The Coinone exchange itself processes the equivalent of over $97 million in transactions per day and is a member of the DAYLI Financial Group. Blockchain solutions and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure provider DAYLI Intelligence and SBI Ripple Asia partnered i­n 2018 to develop a cross-border payment offering between Japan and South Korea, as well as other countries.

SBI Ripple Asia, formed in 2016, is a consortium which includes over 60 Japanese banks that use Ripple’s blockchain solutions for payments and settlement.

SBI Ripple Asia received its electronic payments license as a “substitute business” rather than a conventional bank in Japan a few months ago and launched its Money Tap mobile application in October 2018. The application and remittance platform is designed to meet a gap in the Japanese market, and provide 24/7 payments, where previously transfers between Japanese banks had to be processed between 8.30am and 3.30pm on weekdays only.

Kuwait

The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) has launched a remittance app that uses Ripple’s blockchain network. Called NBK Direct Remit the solution aims to enable frictionless and speedy cross-border transfers and is available 24/7. So far customers can remit money to Jordan, but the bank intends to add other countries soon.

NBK is Kuwait’s largest financial institution and has a presence in 15 countries. The company says it plans to launch further solutions and adopt RippleNet’s network globally.